Barcode Numbers (& letters!)

Did you know that some member / client check-in software does not allow the use of letters in their barcodes? We found this out the hard way when a customer ordered 250 custom keytags with a letter T preceding the barcode number. While his scanner seemed to accept the barcode, his software was not able to match the scanned keytag to a valid member.

A quick call to the software vendor revealed that this particular software was not able to process letters combined with numbers in a barcode. Thankfully, the software vendor was able to make a quick configuration to this particular customer’s setup and they got everything working just fine!

A common convention when numbering your keytags is to start with a 5 digit number – in fact, our printer defaults to barcode number 12345 if no starting number is requested. What is nice about 12345 as a starting number is that it allows you a lot of future members before anything changes about your numbering convention (after all – if you have a gym with 99,999 members, you probably have a full time IT department that can make anything work!).

So the moral of the story is, if you don’t have a preference for your starting number, try starting with 12345. And if you decide for some reason that you would like a letter in your barcode number, you might want to check with your software vendor to ask them if the software is able to read letters in barcode keytags.